Catherine Pierce > Quotes

“The Quiet Girls"

Were we never wolves? No, we never were.
We never let ourselves be lured into a lair.
We never licked honey off an eyetooth

just for the sweet. We never swallowed
our own blood with the honey. We were
neither animal nor stone. We were ephemeral,

motes in light, breath in winter. Drifting
was safe travel; we knew it then, and we were right.
The earth slowed its spinning and we stayed on.

Trenches yawned, and we skirted them. We survived
the meteor shower—no fragments fell on us.
Still we float like spores, always aloft and away.”
― CATHERINE PIERCE

“Then I learned that we’re born
with more bones than we die with.”
― Catherine Pierce

“The Geek Girls

Were we never robins? No, we never were.
No one recognized spring in us, though great elms
grew inside our rib cages. They pushed their spiny

tips outward, so that we felt small stabbings daily,
but they never broke through. So we were never spring,
never foliage. We were the small and oddball beasts:

anoles, silverfish, shrimp. We moved fast and sideways,
upways, allways but straight. We heard of nights lit
with lightning bugs and cigarettes. With rumflame

and tonguefire. We needed none of it. The nights were
black puzzleboxes and we solved them. It was easy—
in the darkness, our minds sparked like flint.”
― Catherine Pierce

“No one hears how they whisper, Think me. The words blacken and climb until she can’t see past their spiny tops.”
― Catherine Pierce, The Girls of Peculiar

“This Is Not an Elegy

At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant,
my fingernails chewed to half-moons.
I took off my clothes in a late March
field. I had secret car wrecks,
secret hysteria. I opened my mouth
to swallow stars. In backseats
I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust,
and distance. I was unformed and total.
I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops
stopped coming around. The heat lifted
its palms. The radio lost some teeth.

Now I see the landscape behind me
as through a Claude glass—
tinted deeper, framed just so, bits
of gilt edging the best parts.
I see my unlined face, a thousand
film stars behind the eyes. I was
every murderess, every whip-
thin alcoholic, every heroine
with the silver tongue. Always young
Paul Newman’s best girl. Always
a lightning sky behind each kiss.

Some days I watch myself
in the third person, speak to her
in the second. I say: I will
meet you in sleep. I will know you
by your stillness and your shaking.
By your second-hand gown.
By your bruises left by mouths
since forgotten. This is not
an elegy because I cannot bear
for it to be. It is only a tree branch
against the window. It is only a cherry
tomato slowly reddening in the garden.
I will put it in my mouth. It will
be sweet, and you will swallow.”
― Catherine Pierce, Famous Last Words

“Her mind won’t listen, veers off into the forest marked Forbidden, holds a knife to her throat when she begs it to stop. For safety, she drinks her own guilt. It inoculates her. Everyone thinks she is the good daughter, her world a gold-leaf illustration. No one knows the words seed themselves in her brain.”
― Catherine Pierce, The Girls of Peculiar